A few weeks ago (25-26 Jan), nine Chiang Mai-based friends and I went to visit 50 piglets at the trash dump near Mae Sot, and to ask their new owners how things were going. It’s taken me this long to finally tell about the experience.

Interview team briefing with our team of translators.

All 50 piglets purchased from funds raised through the pigletsforprogress campaign at startsomegood.com were delivered by mid-December 2013, so the piglets had been getting used to their new homes for about 6 weeks when we visited. Working in teams on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, we managed to capture 39 short household interviews.

The interviews contained questions about the pig’s health, the household’s story, and some basic info that we’ll be able to go back and revisit a year from now, in order to see what kind of impact the piglets have made on the family’s well-being.

I’m eager to take a deep dive into what the surveys can give us in terms of understanding the families who are on the receiving end of this opportunity that pigletsforprogress supporters have made possible. Meanwhile, a couple of things were immediately clear:

1. The piglets are in good health. Four of the owners interviewed reported short episodes of minor digestive issues in their piglets. Those and the rest of the piglets we visited, however, were all in good health when we visited.

2. Additional planning is needed around food.During weekdays, the trash truck comes from Mae Sot to the dump, bringing edible market and restaurant waste with it, from which the piglets (and often the people) manage to get enough diverse food to eat. On weekends, however, the truck doesn’t come. This leaves families who own piglets with the need to buy and cook food for them. Piglets eat a lot, especially as they increase in size, so the cost of this is significant enough to monitor. One person reported a conflict with some other community members over sharing food for the pigs from the truck, which also tells us to explore further. It would be wise to make sure there’s a community plan for feeding in place before introducing another 110 piglets, as we’d planned.

3. Children’s schooling might not be the main impact.Twenty-nine of the families interviewed have school-aged children, and 13 of those cited sending or keeping kids in school as one of the direct impacts that raising a piglet or two would hopefully have on their family. There were other hopes for family and child development, however, that emerged as patterns in family priorities. Three families who are already managing to keep their kids in school said they were eager for extra money with which to buy clothes and food. Three others are hoping to re-unite their families by bringing their kids who are in boarding school back to live with them. Five of the families with school-aged children said the pigs would help them save up to move the family off the dump all together, so that the kids wouldn’t have to grow up there.

Sadly, it seems uniformly clear that teens who haven’t been going to school regularly are not planning to go back now. They have fallen too far behind and don’t want to, according to their parents. We heard 2 stories of teenagers dropping out recently, when a parent became unable to work for health-related reasons, and only 2-3 stories of teenagers who are currently in school - all of them boarding. In most families, however, children between 6 and 12 were all either in school or planning/hoping to go in the near future.

We heard more stories, from:

•the young father of 2 babies who now dreams of his own pig farm upon which to build some family stability;

•the older woman who once had 7 pigs and sold them all to buy a piece of land back home in Burma - the new piglet she’s received will help toward the next step, of building a house there to go home to;

•the 19 year old girl (below) who became the woman of the family at age 7 when her mother died, and whose father has given her the family’s new piglet so she can have something to build her own life on, now that her younger brothers are grown.

Many supporters have asked when we will start the next round of fundraising for 110 more piglets, as originally planned. I remain hesitant until the food & feeding issues are clearer, and am planning further exploration with the community around that soon (hopefully with the help of some friends in Chiang Mai).

That said, January’s visit left me quite hopeful about the kind of family-level impact that these first 50 little piggies might have.